As multimedia content becomes increasingly pervasive, many applications will benefit from an interoperable archive description standard. One such application is the exchange of multimedia documents among heterogeneous audio-visual databases. For example, when a media company purchases multimedia information from a TV broadcaster, the purchaser usually acquires a large collection of multimedia records, which can include images, image segments, videos, video segments, audio content, documents, and the like. The existence of an archive and audio-visual document description standard would allow the purchasing company to take advantage not only of previous extracted features and annotations for each multimedia document, but also of the previous indexing of the whole multimedia collection. Therefore, the media company could minimize the cost of integrating the purchased content with existing content.
Media companies also have the problem of evaluating the content of a multimedia archive to determine what set of multimedia material is best suited for their purposes. One way to evaluate content is to browse the multimedia documents one by one and manually choose the most appropriate material. This solution is very time consuming and tedious. An appropriate description scheme for multimedia archives would enable applications to more efficiently browse the content of multimedia collections, even with content from different sources.
Metasearch engines, which are gateways linking users to multiple and distributed search engines, would also benefit from a multimedia archive description scheme. The operation of current metasearch engines is significantly restrained by the interface limitations of current search engines (e.g. query by example or by sketch and results are a flat list of documents).
Archive descriptions will provide significant advantages for the metasearcher in its interaction with multiple search engines. Such queries can involve large collections of multimedia documents. Queries by archive description will allow efficient matching of a multimedia collection in selected feature spaces without the need of exchanging the description of each multimedia document. The interests addressed by the archive content are also more likely to become evident when viewing a description of a collection of multimedia documents rather than an individual multimedia document.
Currently, multimedia standards, such as MPEG-7, include description standards for individual multimedia documents, but do not extend these standards to the description of collections or archives of multimedia documents. If such standards are adopted and search engines make them available to the metasearcher, a more efficient search solution of a multimedia archive can be obtained.
In view of the foregoing, there remains a need for a multimedia archive description scheme suitable for used with media standards, such as MPEG-7.